We did have this way back in Season One. If I'm right, it also told you where they were on the island as well. If or if not it's still in development is beyond me.

It might have caused alot of drama too.
That's why I think it's missing this season.

NOT SURE ABOUT THAT, BUT IT WAS THE BEST EXPLANATION I CAME UP WITH.

Nope, it was because it was quite hard on the server, checking every page load if a list of people were online or not. It wouldn't check location, but having to check their locations in addition would cause even more strain, so I doubt we'll see something like that anymore.

However, being able to do it from the page that checks who is online might work very well, so the server only looks for a set list of people first. I think this idea could be quite nice and help for the server, though the checking the location of them could be quite difficult, and that could maybe be better left for distracting them and asking.

We did have this way back in Season One. If I'm right, it also told you where they were on the island as well. If or if not it's still in development is beyond me.

It might have caused alot of drama too.
That's why I think it's missing this season.

NOT SURE ABOUT THAT, BUT IT WAS THE BEST EXPLANATION I CAME UP WITH.

Nope, it was because it was quite hard on the server, checking every page load if a list of people were online or not.

You're right about that, Fergus. Season One most certainly had its share of Bad Drama, but exactly none of it was caused by the Friends feature. The big performance hit of having your friends' names appear in the right-hand column was what did it in.

Why hasn't it reappeared as, at least, the address book it used to be for Distractions? Or making Friends a search filter in the Contestants Online list? My own guess would be time. Time... and priorities, and a thousand cool new ideas queueing up to be coded.

As a workaround, get all those friends on aim, msn, gchat, or similar.

That doesn't even work all the time. Most of the time I sit around on gchat and MSN and not on the island at the same time. I know it's quite blasphemous.

I took me a while but I do remember the friends list from S1. I'm sure if someone had a little time they were will willing to spend, they could try to develop the feature using the labs somehow... Maybe as a default search in list contestant as was mentioned earlier.